Few debates spark as much interest as the controversy over how to increase
access to higher education, particularly for racial minority groups. Despite the
knowledge accumulated on the benefits of diversity, the higher education community
knows very little about the determinants of minority student enrollment, or what
universities can do to affect minority student representation. This dissertation seeks to
investigate the factors that affect variance in minority student enrollment levels at public
universities, with particular attention devoted to the political environment.
This analysis of the relationship between political institutions and public
universities draws on a number of subliteratures in public administration and political
science, including theories of political control, descriptive representation, and public
management. As one of the first major studies of the politics of higher education, the
analysis draws on untapped data that allow for better tests of many of these theories.
These data include measures of university enrollments, drawn from the Department of
Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Dataset and the Texas Higher
Education Coordinating Board, data on political institutions, including racial
representation, and interviews of university administrators. The quantitative analysis uses a combination of methods, including ordinary least squares, hierarchical linear
modeling, and descriptive statistics. Using a framework of governance to link these
subliteratures together allows for progress toward more general theories about the
relationship between political institutions and bureaucracy.
Substantively, this analysis also adds to our understanding of what factors affect
minority enrollments. Chapter V uncovers the redistributive effect of the Hopwood case
and California’s Proposition 209, and chapter VI builds on this finding, by testing for the
effect of minority representation in state legislatures. Chapter VII then takes a closer
look at the Texas system, investigating the effect of the Grutter decisions on
enrollments, particularly at the flagship institutions. Overall, findings point to the
importance of university-specific characteristics -- such as the institution’s level of
selectivity and the values held by the university -- in moderating the influence of
political institutions, particularly of court cases and state-level interventions, on minority
student enrollment levels.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1845 |
| Date | 02 June 2009 |
| Creators | Hicklin, Alisa Kay |
| Contributors | Meier, Kenneth J. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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